Tag: disappear

I’m a planner. Short term sacrifice for long term gain is my comfort zone, and has been since I can remember. I have to make a concerted effort to live in the moment.

Neither David or I are where we want to be at the moment. There is a lot of hard work and being a public face in front of me for me to have the success I want, and there is a lot of red tape and frustration in front of him. It makes being a couple challenging, because there’s a lot of frustration and anxiety in our individual lives that can seep into our couple life. And if anything, I want he and I to be stable, whether or not our lives are.

I’m leaving town today for a trip I’ve had planned since before I met him. It’s in the middle of him enduring a lot of red tape, and I want to be supportive so it’s not the best time to be disappearing into the desert. But I’m going because this is for me, this trip and the timing have a lot to do with recovering from my past and I’m getting this done for me. All of the red tape he’s pushing through is the same in a different way for him.

Delayed gratification of all kinds is where we are right now. It’s a struggle, to balance what we have to get done, to stay connected, to not aim our anger at each other, to leave and stay and talk and get disrupted and just want to disappear for a bit to somewhere peaceful. I’ve got half a mind to just book a flight to New Zealand and bounce outta here ASAP.

But that struggle, that effort, that gritting teeth and putting head down and working late and standing in line and crossing our fingers that we’ll hit a payoff? I’m not going to discount that or shrug it off. Because we’re doing this – together – after less than three months. The hard stuff? We’re handling it now. And I like to think that means good things for later.

I’m not sure how much more vulnerable I can be than to let him join me for work functions.

I all but disappeared from public view about a year and a half ago because of a series of family health emergencies, and I am just now stepping back out. The event that got me out the door? A campaign against sewage discharge into creeks.

No, really.

I have been working so hard on so many things, and was feeling like either something had to break or I was going to break. Once again, I didn’t break. I got two calls back to back for new projects. I got asked to help with something I find deeply satisfying to work on. And work night became date night became a really good night.

I’ve avoided dating for years, and I’ve avoided dating in public. I don’t care to have people know who I’m with or not, and I put so much pressure on myself in professional environments that there has been pretty much no way I would ever open that part of my life up to view.

That may say more about the guys I’ve dated?

I’m working on my tendency to isolate and shove people away when I’m stressed. Work is often stressful. So I asked David to come with me to last night’s event, where I was likely to know a few people and need to put on a good face. I’m not sure how much more vulnerable I can be than to let him join me for work functions.

Let me repeat: I go to EVERYTHING alone. I don’t take dates.

Until now. And it was fun and he’s interested and it wasn’t a big deal and we bailed out for burgers and beer and couple bubble. Today I’m at it again in a less formal setting but once again I’m not just showing him what I do, I’m inviting him to join me. And it’s not bad having a hand to hold while I get back out there.

PTSD can be such an isolating experience. I’m trying so hard to protect myself from what happens when there is too much chaos and uncertainty around me that I can’t connect and engage with people. I’m shutting myself out because everything is a threat right now. Emails I haven’t read are a threat. My mom calling up that dinner is ready is a threat. My brother asking who put the broccoli in a colander in the sink is a threat.

I woke up to chaos this morning. I feel so out of control that in my dreams I’m out of control – to the point that I dreamed and then actually peed myself in my sleep. Waking up out of REM sleep always throws me, so I woke up enough to go to the bathroom and finish peeing, strip my bed and pass back out, naked.

When I woke up again, the house was a wreck. Dishes everywhere, the floors dirty, laundry everywhere, the kitchen counters covered in everything possible…I couldn’t deal. I could not operate in so much crazy, so I spent 4 hours cleaning, doing laundry, putting things away and packaging leftovers for my grandma. That’s why there was broccoli in the sink. It was stuffed in the back of the fridge, about to start rotting, and I pulled it out so that I would remember it needed to be cooked. At some point I got a call about an interview for a new project, then I got absorbed with a project that I need to send out progress documents for tomorrow, and I never got to the broccoli.

No one acknowledged that I had cleaned up the wake of their chaos, I just got asked who put the broccoli in the sink.

I did. Fuck you.

I’m disappearing into the desert at the end of next week, and I keep telling myself that if I can just hang on and stay focused for another week, I can breathe again. I just can’t see over all of the shit that is in my way before I get there. And I am completely alone.

I’m pretty used to doing this by myself, at least that’s a more comfortable place than this new hell.

The post I wrote yesterday? Ha. Yeah.

I didn’t hear from David for hours yesterday. No response to the text I sent in the morning, no response to the text I sent in the afternoon asking if he was ok. I put all of my energy yesterday into not freaking out, into not assuming that something had happened to him, to one of his family, that he wasn’t massively hungover, that he hadn’t ghosted me…and worst of all, that after WE JUST HAD THIS CONVERSATION, he hadn’t just failed to hear me or failed to care and done exactly what I had asked him – and he had agreed – not to do.

It brought back all of the abuse, all of the manipulation, all of the fear, all of the four years that I lived through absolute hell in a relationship. Merry Christmas to me, those wounds are still there.

On top of that, I had to deliver news to my grandma that made her cry, deal with general family holiday angst around me and advise my brother on asking out a girl he likes (which did not go well, she just wants to be friends, so now my empathetic ass is taking that disappointment on as well).

I was already a Xanax in when I did hear from him. He’d left his phone at a friend’s the night before and it was dead when he got it back, so I finally hear from him when he got it charged. Did I want to talk?

No. I didn’t want to talk. Ever.

I did talk, last night I told you exactly what will violently drag up horrible pain for me, and that is exactly what you did the next day. You keep telling me you understand, but your words don’t mean shit. Words are empty, they’re hollow, they have no meaning without action, and your actions made it quite clear that I’m not a good fit for you.

I don’t have anyone walking with me in this. I don’t have anyone that I can let in to where the past hurts the most to help me stare it in the face and tell it I’m no longer a prisoner. PTSD doesn’t go away, it doesn’t have a cure, it doesn’t have an end. Do I want to talk? I barely fucking know what to say to myself, much less to you. I am dragging up all kinds of new hurt by dating again, by letting someone in, and there is a reason I have done this by myself for so long. You make it worse. I asked you not to, and you made it worse.

I did talk last night. I kept calm, I didn’t blame, I tried really hard to say how I felt without losing my cool. I tried to say what I need. I was also on Xanax so who even knows. We’d had plans to meet up, and those had been blown to hell, and I really didn’t want to see or talk to him until after Christmas.

The guy who put me here in the first place? He loved to wreck Christmas for me. So this happening so close to Christmas was just another layer of pain.

Did I mention I got Christmas gifts from my stalker yesterday too? That pushed me over into a profanity-laced screaming episode about…everyone.

This morning I was the first to reach out again. I let David know I still wasn’t ok. He made it about him, asking, “Still me?” “Let’s maybe say the situation.” Because I am not wanting to assign blame to him when it was something that just happened. I called him after church and he was on his way to help his brother. Again, not available.

I can’t fix this one. I don’t want to. I’m trying so hard to not let one mishap wreck a relationship that has been so good up to this point, but I needed to see more from him. I needed to see that he understood enough to try to reassure me that he’s there. But he isn’t, and since I’m pretty used to doing this by myself, at least that’s a more comfortable place than this new hell.